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Oswald did it

I have too little faith in the capacity of human beings to keep secrets and organize every detail of a complicated enterprise to give much credence to most conspiracy theories.

That’s why it was easy for me to discount the paranoid rantings about Barack Obama being some sort of Muslim Manchurian Candidate. It’s also why I can’t abandon logic and subscribe to the scenarios that claim the Bush administration engineered the 9/11 attacks.

But, just as humans are seldom clever enough to pull off elaborate conspiracies and then keep them from being revealed, our species also seems unable to let go of our fascination with conspiratorial tales. Dan Brown amassed a fortune simply by tying together a bunch of coincidences, fables and fabrications into an international best-seller, The DaVinci Code. Brown’s flight of fiction had thousands of rational people convinced that Jesus was an old married guy with descendants who became French kings.

Books and movies that spin conspiracy tales either from pure imagination or from reinterpretation of real events always find an audience. Partly, this is because it’s just plain fun to see history and politics given a wild, new spin. Partly, too, it is because many of us want to believe there are powerful forces at work in the world moving the pieces on a hidden chessboard. Unsettling as a belief in these shadowy powers may be, it is, apparently, less troubling than accepting that most things happen because of random chance or human folly.

When something big happens to shake our world, we want the cause to be commensurate with the effect. If a king is killed, we want to believe many hands must have conspired to bring him down. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is the prime, perennial example of this phenomenon. JFK assassination conspiracy theories have been a cottage industry for decades. None accepts the simple explanation that a discontented loser, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone to kill Kennedy.

Now, however, a group of specialists using new technology has demonstrated that the simple explanation is the most likely one:

A team of experts assembled by the Discovery Channel has recreated the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Using modern blood spatter analysis, new artificial human body surrogates, and 3-D computer simulations, the team determined that the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was the most likely origin of the shot that killed the 35th president of the United States.

This certainly is not the final word on the JFK shooting, but it does reinforce my wariness of elaborate theories about vast conspiracies. Most of the time stupidity and simple malevolence are all the explantions we need.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.